The part that makes business owners hesitate about rebuilding their website usually isn't the money. It's not knowing what they're signing up for. How long will this take. How much of it lands on me. What happens to the site that's up right now while the new one is being built. Am I going to get an email in three weeks asking for forty pieces of content I don't have.
Those are fair questions, and most people who build websites are vague about the answers. So here's the actual process, start to finish, the way it runs when I do it.
The first call
Thirty minutes, free, no deck. I ask what the site is supposed to do for the business. Not what you want it to look like. What job it has. For a home inspector, the job is usually getting an agent to book without a phone call. For a catering company, it's getting a real inquiry with a date and a headcount instead of "do you do weddings?" For a lot of businesses I talk to, the site's job is mostly credibility, and that's a legitimate answer too, it just changes what we build.
By the end of that call I can usually tell you whether a rebuild is worth it. Sometimes it isn't. If your Squarespace site is doing fine and the only complaint is that it looks a little dated, I'll say that. I've talked people out of rebuilds and I'd rather do that than take a project that doesn't pay for itself.
What I look at before quoting anything
I go through the site you have now. Every page, the analytics if you'll share them, and what shows up when you Google your business name and your service plus your city. I'm looking for three things: pages that are doing real work, pages nobody visits, and the gap between what people search for and what you actually have on the site.
Almost every small business site I open has the same problem. Five pages of content, three of which nobody reads, and nothing at all on the specific services that people are typing into Google. That gap is usually where the opportunity is, and it shapes the whole plan.
Then you get a number and a timeline, written down, before anything starts.
Content, which is the part that stalls projects
This is where most website rebuilds die. The developer finishes the design, sends over a content request, and the business owner stares at it for six weeks because writing twelve pages of copy is a real job and nobody has time for it.
I handle content differently. I draft it. You correct it. I take what's on your current site, what you told me on the calls, and what I can find about how you actually talk about your work, and I write the pages. Then you read them and tell me where I got it wrong, because I will get things wrong, especially the details of how your service works. Editing something in front of you takes an afternoon. Writing it from nothing takes a month you don't have.
What I do need from you: photos, if you have good ones. Your service list, accurate and current. Pricing, if you show pricing. Anything with a legal or licensing requirement attached to how you describe it.
Build
Two to four weeks for a typical small business site. I build on a real codebase rather than a page builder, which matters less for how the site looks and more for what you can do with it later, like adding a booking flow, an intake form that actually routes somewhere, or a lead response agent that answers inquiries at ten at night. Page builders put a ceiling on that. I've written about what makes a website AI-ready if you want the longer version of why that ceiling exists.
Your current site stays up the entire time. The new one gets built on a staging link only you and I can see. Nothing goes live until you've clicked through it.
During the build you'll get the staging link early and I'd rather you look at it in pieces than wait for a big reveal. Big reveals are how you end up with a site the owner quietly doesn't like.
Launch day
The redirects are the whole ballgame here. Every URL on your old site that had traffic or links pointing at it gets mapped to the matching page on the new one. Skip that step and you lose the search rankings you spent years earning. It's the single most common way a rebuild goes wrong, and it's entirely preventable. There's more detail on that in whether rebuilding your website hurts your SEO.
The DNS switch takes about an hour. I watch the analytics and search console for the first couple weeks to catch anything that broke.
After
You own the code and the domain. Not a license, not a seat on a platform. If you decide you never want to talk to me again, you take the files and hire anyone. That's the point of owning your website rather than renting it.
Small changes, I handle. Bigger additions get quoted separately. Most of my clients come back six months later wanting the site to do something new, and that's usually the interesting part anyway.
Total time from first call to live, for a normal small business site with a cooperative schedule: four to six weeks. The two things that stretch it are photography and owner review time. Neither is a surprise if we name them up front.
If you want to talk through what this would look like for your business, the audit is free and takes 30 minutes. Get in touch